Notices by Jamie Teh (jcsteh@aus.social)

@joachim @juliette Totally blind screen reader user here. You're correct: mixed case is better to separate words, where all lower case may result in something unintelligible without extra effort for the user. I think the benefits of this extend beyond screen reader users though; i.e. all lower case could be difficult even for some sighted users to interpret, though I can't cite evidence for that.

Wait. Copilot will be taking over alt+space on Windows? That is not okay. How will we access the system menu that has existed since forever containing minimise, maximise, etc.? Also, wtf aren't they just using Windows+c or the Copilot key they forced upon us? https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/10/24318241/microsoft-copilot-native-app-quick-view-windows-10-11

@clv0 I think PowerToys has a tool to do this? And probably SharpKeys as well? But I haven't tried myself. Or you could probably do it more simply with AutoHotkey, but that requires that the script is always running, though it doesn't use much in terms of resources.

That thing where you decide it might be interesting to test a hypothesis, realise the code refactoring you're going to have to do to test said hypothesis is quite a bit more intense than you thought, then get several hours in and have to decide whether to keep sinking time into your experiment or quit while you're ahead.

I absolutely cannot tolerate this hovercard aria-description nonsense on GitHub, nor can I tolerate the headings that get added to every row of folder and file lists any longer. Thus, I just pushed tweaks to the GitHub Accessibility Fixes AxSGrease script to banish both of these. https://github.com/jcsteh/axSGrease/raw/master/GitHubA11yFixes.user.js

@NVAccess Semaphore here. I'm known for a bias towards web aps for various reasons, but Semaphore truly is a delight to use, which is more than I can say for some other web apps (Gmail, etc.) even though I use them daily.

@darrell73 @KaraLG84 I kinda gave up reporting bugs to Apple a while ago because I put in a lot of time and effort to report details and then there's just radio silence. A bug often just gets closed as a duplicate of some other bug or something and then you can't see anything more. That's just an aspect of Apple's closed culture, but it's not something I'm personally willing to sink time into with no indication of any kind of return.

It is deeply exasperating to me that Apple continue to increasingly fuck accessibility of Apple Books, especially with braille. I'm currently reading a book to my son in the evenings. Here are just two of the bugs I have to deal with while trying to enjoy this with him, breaking the flow of my reading:
1. When the page turns, often the cursor will jump to the bottom of the screen, so I have to jump to the top and down four elements to continue reading.
2. Sometimes, the cursor randomly jumps to the start of the paragraph while I'm reading and continues to do this randomly every 30 seconds or so.
"Why not use an alternative app?" you might ask. I would, but DRM means that i can't. And these fucking big profit-above-people companies wonder why people resort to piracy. Because apparently, when you pay for something, you actually get a shittier experience.

@devinprater Isn't Win11 great? It's good to know they still haven't properly fixed that bug in a core part of Windows that everyone uses every day.